Energy firm Uniper has announced plans to build a new data center hub at its ‘Staudinger’ power plant in Hesse, Germany.

The new complex will be built in the town of Großkrotzenburg on a portion of the site currently occupied by a coal-fired power station, which is being demolished.

The new hub will also contain a battery energy storage system (BESS) and a new gas-fired power plant. No information was released by Uniper about the projected combined compute power of the data centers. DCD has approached the firm for comment.

The new data centers will be built atop where the cooling towers of the coal-fired plant formerly stood, Uniper power plant manager Andreas Armenat told Haunauer Anzeiger. The firm intends to allocate around 4.94 million sq ft (459,000 sqm) of land on the site to the facilities, Armenat said. A nearby substation is also being expanded by grid operator Tennet ahead of the hub’s construction. However, a decision has yet to be reached on how many data centers will be built at the site. Talks with investors to fund the project are also ongoing.

Founded in 2016 as a spin-off of E.ON, Uniper was nationalized by the German federal government in 2022 amid that year’s energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this month, Uniper announced that it would invest €5 billion ($5.73bn) in energy infrastructure between 2025 and 2030. The firm also identified at least ten power plants where data centers could be built nearby. Three of these projects are actively being developed, while one in the UK is now complete. Uniper added that it is exploring revenue generation opportunities with data center operators through power purchase agreements.

Hesse is one of Germany’s most mature data center markets, with 173 facilities in operation, according to DataCenters.com. However, uncertainty about the amount of political support for new projects recently led to the cancellation of a facility planned by Stack Infrastructure for the town of Babenhausen, southeast of Hesse’s largest city, Frankfurt am Main. Delays in finding a suitable grid connection have also seen a large data center project planned by EdgeConneX outside the town of Maintal temporarily halted.

Learn more about the data center market in Switzerland and the wider DACH region, and meet with other executives and experts at the DCN Zurich event later this year.